ON A FAST TRACK WITH MR. CAINE

Michael Caine did not appear in every other film released in 1986; it only seemed that way from time to time.

In fact, he was visible in five films, a list headed by Woody Allen’s “Hannah and Her Sisters.” He is being pushed for best actor for his role as Mia Farrow’s husband, who has a brief, intense fling with her sister, Barbara Hershey. It would be Caine’s fourth nomination (“Alfie,” “Sleuth,” “Educating Rita”).

Caine also had a small, incandescent role as an icily nasty Soho gangster in “Mona Lisa,” done as a favor for his Cockney friend Bob Hoskins. He did another film-stealing supporting part, as an arrogantly egotistical English leading man in Alan Alda’s “Sweet Liberty.”

“Sweet revenge!” Caine said at lunch last week. “Getting my own back on some of the starry chaps I worked with in the early days.”

Caine was also to be seen in “Water,” which sank with hardly a ripple, and in “Half Moon Street,” with Sigourney Weaver. Having grown up in straitened working-class circumstances, the son of a market porter and a charlady, Caine has always been a compulsive worker himself. But now, he says, it’s a little different.

“I’m doing exactly what I want to do, things I think’ll be fun. I’m enjoying myself.”

He has lately finished “Surrender,” a Jerry Belson comedy with Sally Field, and “The Fourth Protocol,” the Frederick Forsythe spy thriller shot in England and Finland, co-starring with Pierce Brosnan.

Making “Hannah” was a family experience, in several senses. Caine, the matchmaker, who had known Mia Farrow since her London days, introduced her to Woody Allen at Elaine’s in New York several years ago. The film was shot in Mia’s apartment, the children were all her children, the prevailing condition a series of Thanksgiving dinners. It was a warm but testing experience.

“I’m used to doing one, two, maybe three takes,” Caine says. “With Woody, it was nine or 10. He’s a perfectionist. He wouldn’t let any of us be less than great as he saw it. He’d spot something I’d done in one take and left out in another.”

But they agreed about Caine’s basic conception of the character. “He was interested in the basic attitude, and evidently I’d got the right attitude. I always thought I was playing Woody’s alter ego, and he seemed to like the guy.”

Earlier this year Caine wrote a wickedly amusing piece for a London Sunday newspaper about the party scene in Hollywood. It is as well, he thinks, that few of his local hosts saw it.

In Hollywood, he explains, “There is an A group, a B group, a C group and a Fun group. I’m in the Fun group.” The way to lose your A group status, Caine says, is to be caught dead at B or C group gatherings. He did not make the A, B or C gatherings sound wonderful.

In London, Caine further explains, “There is also the A group, the B group, the C group and the Fun group. But , there are six societies. There is the academic, the aristocratic, the artistic, the financial, the literary and the political (subdivided into the left and the right). So that’s 24 sections altogether. I’m in the Fun group of all six societies. In London you have to be a bit of a chameleon. Actually, I don’t go to parties very much over there.”

Most of Caine’s real interests, he says, are home-centered and family-centered. He and the family like to travel. He collects antiques, he gardens industriously, he cooks. On the day we spoke, indeed, he was looking forward to some turkey hash he had been two days preparing.

“My wife and I have an arrangement,” Caine says. “I cook everything that takes two days. She does everything that takes less than 20 minutes. At our house, you get a very fast meal, or a very slow meal.

“I love to cook. If you’re doing a set meal for several people, timing it so everything hits the table when it should, you’ve got your hands full. I’d go nuts sitting around my house worrying about acting.

“Same thing with gardening. You do it on your own; you’re in charge. They’re my psychiatrist: cooking and gardening. The Chinese say the basis of life is growing, cooking and eating your own stuff. That’s exactly what I have done in England.”

What it does, Caine says, “is stop you from going further crazy. You’ve already gone nuts, having been a beginning actor. There’s no lower form of life. Nobody wants to know you. They have ads in tobacconists’ windows for rooms to let: They’d say ‘No blacks, Irish, dogs or actors.’ You couldn’t even get ahead of the dogs. Can you imagine being a black Irish actor with a dog?

“That’s why actors never go by society’s rules. When you do become a more substantial citizen, you don’t change. They--whoever they are--didn’t want to know you back then, so screw ‘em.”

His chief outside interest, Caine says, is opening restaurants. He is down to part-ownership in one restaurant in London now, but has concepts for at least three more and will probably open one of them there in the new year. Not here. “It’s a little too fickle and trendy here,” he says. “You never know what’s in, or out, or why.”

One source of Caine’s fondness for the U.S. is the different attitude toward success he finds. “If you achieve something in England, the attitude is envy. ‘How can we bring him down?’ Here it’s, ‘How can I imitate him and be a success myself?’ ”

Caine’s father never lived to see his son make it big. But his mother is still alive at 86 and is as comfortable as he can make her. “It’s a little different from the days when you hid behind the curtains when the rent man came ‘round. It’s been fine for her for the last 25 years, but the first 60 were a little rough.

“But after you’ve bought a couple of suits and a watch, what is money? It’s freedom, is what it is. Money is the freedom to say no, to make choices.”